WebSphere Application Server Version 8.0 focuses on three primary goals:

Speeding your delivery of applications and services

Enhancing operational efficiency and reliability

Expanding the security and administrative control of the server

Some of key features in V8:

Speeds the development and test lifecycle by providing “self-service” access to consistent topologies and patterns through the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition and the IBM Workload Deployer.

Faster to edit, compile and debug is through a new feature that permits you to use a monitored directory. Application contents, including complete applications and/or modules, can be moved into or out of the monitored directory.

Rich set of feature packs for programming model support

Java EE6 expands greatly the developer value that was first introduced in Java EE5, which was a core programming model in Version 7